IBRBRV OF CONGRESS 



OU 897 477 3 • 

EULOGY 



CHIEF-JUSTICE CHASE, 



DELIVERED BY 



WILLIAM M. EVARTS, 



BEFORE THE 



ALUMNI OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, AT HANOVER, JUNE 24, 1874. 



PUBLISHED AT THEIR REQUEST. 



HANOVER, N". H. : 
J . B. PARKER 

1874. 



EULOGY 



CHIEF-JUSTICE CHASE, 



DELIVERED BY 



"WILLIAM M. EYARTS, 



BEFORE THE 



ALUMNI OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, AT HANOVER, JUNE 24, 1874. 



PUBLISHED AT THEIR REQUEST. 



HANOVER, N. H.: 
J. B. PARKER 

1874. 






• 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

D. APPLETON & CO., 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



EULOGY 



CHIEF-JUSTICE CHASE, 



MR. PRESIDENT and Gentlemen, the Alumni op Dart- 
mouth College : When, not many weeks since, the com- 
mittee of your association did me the honor to invite me to 
present, in an address to the assembled graduates of the college, 
a commemoration of the life, the labors, and the fame of the 
very eminent man and greatly honored scholar of your disci- 
pline, lawyer, orator, senator, minister, magistrate, whom living 
a whole nation admired and revered, whom dead a whole na- 
tion laments, I felt that neither a just sense of public duty nor 
the obligations of personal affection would permit me to decline 
the task. Yielding, perhaps too readily, to the persuasions of 
your committee that somewhat close professional and public 
association with the Chief-Justice in the later years of his life, 
and the intimate enjoyment of his personal friendship, might 
excuse my want of that binding tie of fellowship in a commemo- 
ration, in which the venerated college does dutiful honor to a 
son, and the assembled alumni crown with their affection the 
memory of a brother, I dismissed also, upon the same persua- 
sion, all anxious solicitudes, which otherwise would have op- 
pressed me, lest importunate and inextricable preoccupations of 
time and mind should disable me from presenting as consider- 
able, and as considerate, a survey of the eminent character and 
celebrated career of Mr. Chase as should comport with them, or 
satisfy the just exigencies of the occasion. 



The commemoration which brings us together has about it 
nothing funereal, in sentiment or observance, to darken our 
minds or sadden our hearts to-day. The solemn rites of sepul- 
ture, the sobbings of sorrowing affection, the homage of public 
grief, the concourse of the great officers of state, the assem- 
blage of venerable judges, the processions of the bar, of the 
clergy, of liberal and learned men, the atteudant crowds of 
citizens of every social rank aDd station, both in the great city 
where he died, and at the national capital, have already graced 
his burial with all imaginable dignity and unmeasured rever- 
ence. To prolong or renew this pious office is no part of our 
duty to-day. Nor is the maturity or nurture which the college 
gives to those it calls its sons, bestowed as it is upon their mind 
and character, affected by the death of the body as is the heart 
of the natural mother ; nor are you, his brethren in this foster 
care of the spirit, bowed with the same sense of bereavement 
as are natural kindred. The filial and fraternal relation which 
he bore to you, the college and the alumni, is hardly broken by 
his death, nor is he hidden from you by his burial. His com- 
pleted natural life is but the assurance and perpetuation of the 
power, the fame, the example, which the discipline and culture 
here bestowed had for their object, and in which they find 
their continuing and ever-increasing glory. The energy here 
engendered has not ceased its beneficent activity, the torch here 
lighted still diffuses its illumination, and the fires here kindled 
still radiate their heat. 

Not less certain is it that the spirit of this commemoration 
imposes no task of vindication or defense, and tolerates no tone 
of adulation or applause. The tenor of this life, the manifesta- 
tion of this character, was open and public, before the eyes of 
all men, upon an eminent stage of action, displayed constantly 
on the high places of the world. No faculty that Mr. Chase 
possessed, no preparation of mind or of spirit, for great under- 
takings or for notable achievements, ever failed of exercise or 
exhibition for want of opportunity, or, being exercised or ex- 
hil >ited, missed commensurate recognition or responsive plaudits 
from his countrymen. His career shows no step backward, 
the places he filled were all. of the highest, the services he ren- 
dered were the most difficult as well as the most eminent. If, 



as the preacher proclaims, " time and chance happeneth to all," 
the times in which Mr. Chase lived permitted the widest scope 
to great abilities and the noblest forms of public service ; and 
the fortunes of his life show the felicity of the occasions which 
befell him to draw out these abilities, and to receive these ser- 
vices. Not less complete was the round of public honors which 
crowned his public labors, and we have no occasion, here; to 
lament any shortcomings of prosperity or favor, or repeat the 
authentic judgment which the voices of his countrymen have 
pronounced upon his fame. . 

The simple office, then, which seems to me marked out for 
one who assumes this deputed service in the name of the col- 
lege and for the friends of good learning, is, in so far as the 
just limits of time and circumstance will permit, to expose the 
main features of this celebrated life, " to decipher the man and 
his nature," to connect the true elements of his character and 
the moulding force of his education with the work he did, with 
the influence he wielded in life, with the power of the example 
which lives after him, and always to have in view, as the most 
fruitful uses of the hour, his relations to the men and events of 
his times, and, not less, his true place in history among the 
lawyers, orators, statesmen, magistrates of the land. Vera non 
verba is our maxim to-day ; truth, not words, must mark the 
tribute the college pays to the sober dignity and solid worth of 
its distinguished son. 

Born of a lineage, which on the father's side dates its Ameri- 
can descent from the Puritan emigration of 1640, and on the 
mother's, finds her the first of that stock native to this country, 
the son of these parents took no contrariety of traits from the 
union of the blood of the English Puritans and the Scotch Cov- 
enanters, but rather harmonious corroboration of the character- 
istics of both. These, sturdy enough in either, combined in 
this descendant to produce as independent and resolute a nature 
for the conflicts and labors of his day, as any experience of trial 
or triumph, of proscription or persecution suffered or resisted, 
had required or supplied in the long history of the contests of 
these two congenial races with priests and potentates, with prin- 
cipalities and powers. Nothing could be less consonant with a 
just estimate of the strong traits of this lineage, than which 



6 

neither Hebrew, nor Grecian, nor Roman nurture has "wrought 
for its heroes either a firmer fibre or a nobler virtue, than to as- 
cribe its chief power to enthusiasm or fanaticism. Plain, sober, 
practical men and women as they were, there was no hard detail 
of every-day life that they were not equal to, no patient and 
cheerless sacrifice they could not endure, no vicissitude of adverse 
or ' prosperous fortune which they could not meet with un- 
checked serenity. If it be enthusiasm that in them the fear of 
God had cast out the fear of man, or fanaticism that they placed 
" things that are spiritually discerned " above the vain shows 
of the world of sense, in so far they were enthusiasts and fanat- 
ics. In every stern conflict, in every vast labor, in every intel- 
lectual and moral development of which this country has been the 
scene, without fainting or weariness they have borne their part, 
and in the conclusive triumph of the principles of the Puritans 
and their policies over all discordant, all opposing elements, 
which enter into the wide comprehension of American nation- 
ality, theirs be the praise which belongs to such well-doing. 

The son of a farmer — a man of substance, and of credit with 
his neighbors, and not less with the people of his State — young 
Chase drew from his boyhood the vigor of body and of mind 
which rural life and labors are well calculated to nourish. Sev- 
eral of his father's brothers were graduates of this college, and 
reached high positions in Church and State. An unpropitious 
turn of the commercial affairs of the country nipped, with its 
frost, the growing prosperity of his father, whose death, soon 
following, left him, in tender years, and as one of a numerous 
family, to the sole care of his mother. With most scanty means, 
her thrift and energy sufficed to save her children from igno- 
rance or declining manners ; maintained their self-respect and 
independence ; set them forth in the world well disciplined, 
stocked with good principles, and inspired with proud and 
honorable purposes. To the praise of this excellent woman, 
wherever the name of her great son shall be proclaimed, this, 
too, shall be told in remembrance of her: that a Christian's 
faith, and a mother's love, as high and pure as ever ennobled 
the most famous matrons of history, stamped the character and 
furnished the education which equipped him for the labors and 
the triumphs of his life. One cannot read her letters to her son 



in college without the deepest emotion. How many such women 
were there, in the plain ranks of New England life, in her gen- 
eration ! How many are there now ! Paying marvelous little 
heed to the discussion of women's rights, they show a wonderful 
addiction to the performance of women's duties. 

His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the 
care and expense of his education, and this drew him to the 
"West, where, under this tutelage, he pursued academic studies 
for two years. At the end of this time he returned to his 
mother's charge, entered the junior class of Dartmouth College, 
and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of eighteen. The 
only significance, in its impression on his future life, of this brief 
guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining in- 
fluence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as 
the forum and arena of his professional and public life. After 
spending four years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by 
teaching, a law-student with Mr. Wirt — then at the zenith of his 
faculties and his fame — studying men and manners at the cap- 
ital, watching the new questions then shaping themselves for 
political action, observing the celebrated statesmen of the day, 
conversant with the great Chief- Justice Marshall and his learned 
associates on the bench of the Supreme Court, and with Web- 
ster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he was 
admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established 
himself at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his 
home from the New England of his family, his birth, his educa- 
tion, and his love, to the ruder but equally strenuous and more 
expansive society of the West. 

While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious in- 
struction of his mother, and his own profound sense of religious 
obligations under the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the 
Episcopal Church as the body of Christian believers in whose 
communion he found the best support for the religious life he 
proposed to himself. When he left your college he had not 
wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of adopting the cleri- 
cal profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was simple 
and constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and 
rule of his life, in devout confidence in the moral government of 
the world, as a present and real supremacy over the race of man 



8 

and all human affairs. He was all his life a great student oj the 
Scriptures, and no modern specidations ever shook the solid rea- 
sons of his belief. When he entered the city of Washington, 
fresh from college, "the earnest prayer of his heart was, that 
God would give him work to do, and success in doing it." 
When he was laying out the plans of professional life, on his 
first establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation was, " May God 
enable me to be content with the consciousness of faithfully dis- 
charging all my duties, and deliver me from a too eager thirst 
for the applause and favor of men." All through the successive 
and manifold activities of his busy and strenuous life, when, to 
outward seeming, they were all worldly and personal, the same 
predominant sense of duty and religious responsibility animated 
and solemnized the whole. 

At this point in his life we may draw the line between the 
period of education for the work he had before him and that 
work itself. What Mr. Chase was, at this time, in all the essen- 
tial traits of his moral and intellectual character — in his views of 
life, its value, its just objects and aims, its social, moral, and re- 
ligious responsibilities; in his views of himself, his duties, obli- 
gations, prospects, and possibilities; in his determinations and 
desires — such, it seems to me from the most attentive study of 
all these points — such, in a very marked degree, he continued to 
be at every stage of his ascent in life. 

What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the con- 
trolling constituents, of character — and what the assurance of 
their persistence and their force — which this youth could bring 
to the service of the State, or contribute to the advancement of 
society and the well-being of mankind \ 

These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and ade- 
quate to fill out worthily the life of large opportunities which, 
though not yet foreseen to himself, was awaiting him. 

The faculty of reason was very broad and strong in him, yet 
without being vast or surprising. It seized the sensible and 
practical relations of all subjects submitted to it, and firmly held 
them in its tenacious grasp ; it exposed these relations to the ap- 
prehension of those whose opinion or action it behooved him to 
influence, by methods direct and sincere, discarding mere inge- 
nuity, and disdaining the subtleness of insinuation. His eduea- 



tion had all been of a kind to discipline and invigorate his nat- 
ural powers ; not to encumber them with a besetting weight ol 
learning, or to supplant them by artificial training. 

His oratory was vigorous, with those " qualities of clearness, 
force, and earnestness, which produce conviction." His rhetoric 
was ample, but not rich ; his illustrations apposite, but seldom 
to the point of wit ; his delivery weighty and imposing. 

His force of will, whether in respect of peremptoriness or 
persistency, was prodigious. His courage to brave, and bis 
fortitude to endure, were absolute. His loyalty to every cause 
in which he enlisted — his fidelity in every warfare in which he 
took up arms — were proof against peril and disaster. 

His estimate of human affairs, and of his own relation to 
them, was sober and sedate. All their grandeur and splendor, 
to his apprehension, connected themselves with the immortal 
life, and with God, as their guide, overseer, and ruler ; and the 
sum of the practical wisdom of all worthy personal purposes 
seemed to him to be, to discern the path of duty, and to pur- 
sue it. 

His views of the commonwealth were essentially Puritan. 
Equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty, 
were the adequate, and the only adequate, principles with him 
to maintain the strength and virtue of society, and preserve the 
power and permanence of the State. "With these principles un- 
impaired and unimpeded he feared nothing for his countrymen 
or their government, and he made constant warfare upon every 
assault or menace that endangered them. 

It was with these endowments and with this preparation of 
spirit, that Mr. Chase confronted the realities of life, and as- 
sumed to play a part which, whether humble or high in the scale 
and plane of circumstance, was sure to be elevated and worthy 
in itself ; for the loftiness of his spirit for the conflict of life was 

"Such as raised 
To height of noblest temper heroes old 
Arming to battle." 

Such a character necessarily confers authority among men, 
and that Mr. Chase was ready, on all occasions arising, to assert 
his high principles by comporting action was never left in doubt. 



10 

Whether by interposing his strong arm to save Mr. Birney from 
the fury of a mob of Cincinnati gentlemen, incensed at the free- 
dom of his press in its defiance of slavery ; or by his bold and 
constant maintenance in the courts of the cause of fugitive 
slaves in the face of the resentments of the public opinion of 
the day ; or by his fearless desertion of all reigning politics to 
lead a feeble band of protestants through the wilderness of anti- 
slavery wanderings, its pillar of cloud by day, its pillar of fire 
by night; or as Governor of Ohio facing 'the intimidations of 
the slave States, backed by Federal power and a storm of 
popular passion ; or in consolidating the triumphant politics on 
the urgent issue which was to flame out into rebellion and re- 
volt ; or in his serene predominance, during the trial of the 
President, over the rage of party hate which brought into peril 
the coordination of the great departments of Government, and 
threatened its whole frame — in all these marked instances of 
public duty, as in the simple routine of his ordinary conduct, 
Mr. Chase asked but one question to determine his course of 
action, " Is it right ? " If it were, he had strength, and will, 
and courage to carry him through with it. 

In the ten years of professional life which followed his ad- 
mission to the bar, Mr. Chase established a repute for ability, 
integrity, elevation of purpose and capacity for labor, which 
would have surely brought him the highest rewards of forensic 
prosperity and distinction, and in due course, of eminent judicial 
station. In this quieter part of his life, as in his public career, it 
is noticeable that his employments were never common-place, but 
savored of a public zest and interest.. His compilation of the 
Ohio Statutes was a magnum ojms, indeed, for the leisure hours 
of a yoimg lawyer, and possesses a permanent value, justifying 
the assurance Chancellor Kent gave him, that this surprising 
labor would find its " reward in the good he had done, in the 
talents he had shown, and in the gratitude of his profession." 

But this quiet was soon broken, never to be resumed, and 
though the great office of Chief -Justice was in store for him, it 
was to be reached by the path of statesmanship and not of 
jurisprudence. 

If it had seemed ever to Mr. Chase and his youthful con- 
temporaries, that they had come upon times when, as Sir Thomas 



11 

Browne thought two hundred years ago, " it is too late to be 
ambitious," and " the great mutations of the world are acted," 
the illusion was soon dispelled. It has been sadly said of Greece 
in the age of Plutarch, that " all her grand but turbulent activi- 
ties, all her noble agitations spent, she was only haunted by the 
spectres of her ancient renown." ISTo doubt, forty years ago, 
in this country, there was a prevalent feeling that the age of 
the early settlements and, again, of our "War of Independence, 
had closed the heroic chapters of our history, and left nothing 
for the public life of our later times, but peaceful and progressive 
development, and the calm virtues of civil prudence, to work 
out of our system all incongruities and discords. But what 
these political speculations assigned as the passionless work of 
successive generations, was to be done in our time, and, as it 
were, in one " unruly right." 

Mr. Chase had supported General Harrison for the presi- 
dency in 1840, not upon any very thorough identification with 
"Whig politics, but partly from a natural tendency toward the 
personal fortunes of a candidate from the West, and from his 
own State, in the absence of any strong attraction of principle 
to draw him to the candidate or the politics of the Democratic 
party. But, upon the death of Harrison and the elevation of 
Tyler to the presidency, Mr. Chase, promptly discerning the 
signs of the times, took the initiative toward making the national 
attitude and tendency on the subject of slavery the touchstone 
of politics. Politic and prudent by nature, and with no per- 
sonal disappointments or grievances to bias his course, he doubt- 
less would have preferred to save and use the accumulated and 
organized force of one or the other of the political parties which 
divided the country, and press its power into the service of the 
principles and the political action which he had, undoubtingly, 
decided the honor and interests of the country demanded. He 
was among the first of the competent and practical political 
thinkers of the day, to penetrate the superficial crust which 
covered the slumbering fires of our politics, and to plan for the 
guidance of their irrepressible heats so as to save the constituted 
liberties of the nation, if not from convulsion, at least from con- 
flagration. He found the range of political thought and action, 
which either party permitted to itself or to its rival, compressed 



12 

by two unyielding postulates. The first of these insisted, that 
the safety of the republic would tolerate no division of parties, 
in Federal politics, which did not run through the slave States 
as well as the free. The second was that no party could main- 
tain a footing in the slave States, that did not concede the 
nationality of the institution of slavery and its right, in equality 
with all the institutions of freedom, to grow with the growth 
and strengthen with the strength of the American Union. 
Nothing can be more interesting to a student of politics than 
the masterly efforts of patriotism and statesmanship, in which 
all the great men of the country participated, for many years, 
to confine the perturbations of our public life to a controversy 
with this latter and lesser postulate. Seward with the Whig 
party, Chase with the Democratic party, and a host of others in 
both, tried hard to conciliate the irreconcilable, and to stultify 
astuteness, to the acceptance of the proposition that slavery, its 
growth girdled, would not be already struck with death. Quite 
early, however, Mr. Chase grappled with the primary postulate, 
and through great labors, wise counsels, long-suffering patience, 
and by the successive stages of the Liberty party, Independent 
Democracy, and Free-Soil party, led up the way to the Repub- 
lican party, which, made up by the Whig party dropping its 
slave State constituency, and the Democratic party losing its 
Free-Soil constituents, rent this primary postulate of our poli- 
tics in twain, and took possession of the Government by the 
election of its candidate, Mr. Lincoln. 

This movement in polities was one of prodigious difficulty 
and immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the 
prime actors in it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey 
and depth of insight. In the system of American politics it 
created as vast a disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's 
axis, or the displacement of the solar gravitation, in our natural 
world. This great transaction filled the twenty years of Mr. 
Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age of thirty to that of 
fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of having 
understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, 
this political movement, and whether himself leading or coop- 
erating or following in the array and march of events, his plan, 
his part, his service, were all for the cause, its prosperity, and its 



13 

success*' To one who considers this career, not as completed and 
triumphant, not with the glories of power, and dignities, and 
fame which attended it, not with the blessings of a liberated race, 
a consolidated Union, an ennobled nationality which receive the 
plaudits of his countrymen, but as its hazards and renunciations, 
its toils and its perils, showed at the outset, in contrast with the 
ease and splendor of his personal fortunes which adhesion to the 
political power of slavery seemed to insure to him, and then con- 
templates the promptness of his choice and the steadfastness of 
his perseverance, the impulse and the action seem to find a paral- 
lel in the life of the great Hebrew statesman, who, " by faith, 
when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pha- 
raoh's daughter," and "ly faith, forsook Egypt, not fearing the 
wrath of the king." 

The first half of this period of twenty years witnessed only 
the preliminaries, equally brave and sagacious, of agitation, pro- 
mulgation of purposes and opinions, consultations, conventions, 
and political organizations, more and more comprehensive and 
effective. All this time Mr. Chase was simply a citizen, and 
apparently could expect no political station or authority till it 
should come from the prosperous fortunes of the party he was 
striving to create. Suddenly, by a surprising conjunction of 
circumstances he was lifted, at one bound, to the highest and 
widest sphere of influence, upon the opinion of the country, 
which our political establishment presents— I mean the Senate 
of the United States. The elective body, the Legislature of 
Ohio, was filled in almost equal numbers with Whigs and Dem- 
ocrats, but a handful of Liberty party men held the control to 
prevent or determine a majority. They elected Mr. Chase. 
The concurrence is similar, in its main features, to the election 
of Mr. Sumner to the Senate, two years afterward, in Massachu- 
setts. Much criticism of such results is always and necessarily 
excited. The true interpretation of such transactions is simply a 
transition state from old to new politics, wherein party names 
and present interests are unchanged, but opinions and projects and 
prospects are taking a new shape, and the old mint, all at once, 
astonishes everybody by striking a new image and superscription,' 
soon to be stamped upon the whole coinage. The part of Mr! 
Chase in this election, as of Mr. Sumner in his own, was elevated 



14 

and without guile. His term in the Senate brought him to the 
year 1856, and was followed by two successive elections and four 
years' service as Governor of Ohio, and a reelection to the Sen- 
ate. In these high stations he added public authority to his 
opinions and purposes, and gained for them wider and wider in- 
fluence, while he discharged all general senatorial duties, and 
official functions as Governor, with benefit to the legislation of 
the nation and to the administration of the State.' 

As the presidential election approached and the Republican 
party took the field with an assurance of assuming the admin- 
istration of the Federal Government, and of meeting the weighty 
responsibility of the new political basis, the question of candi- 
dates absorbed the attention of the party, and attracted the inter- 
est of the whole country. When a new dynasty is to be en- 
throned, the personality of the ruler is an element of the first 
importance. In the general judgment of the country, and 
equally to the apprehension of the mass of his own party and of 
its rival, Mr. Seward stood as the natural candidate, and upon 
manifold considerations. His unquestioned abilities, his un- 
doubted fidelity, his vast services and wide following in the party, 
presented an unprecedented combination of political strength to 
obtain the nomination and carry the election, and of adequate 
faculties and authority with the people for the prosperous ad- 
ministration of the presidential office. Second only to Mr. 
Seward, in this general judgment of his countrymen, stood Mr. 
Chase, with just enough of preference for him, in some quarters, 
over Mr. Seward, upon limited and special considerations, to en- 
courage that darling expedient of our politics a resort to a tli'wJ 
candidate. This recourse was had, and Mr. Lincoln was nomi- 
nated and elected. 

The disclosure of Mr. Lincoln to the eyes of his countrymen 
as a possible, probable, actual candidate for the presidency came 
upon them with the suddenness and surprise of a revelation. 
His advent to power as the ruler of a great people, in the su- 
preme juncture of their affairs, to be the head of the state 
among its tried and trusted statesmen, to subordinate and co- 
ordinate the pride and ambition of leaders, the passions and in- 
terests of the masses, and to guide the destinies of a nation 
whose institutions were all framed for obedience to law and per- 



15 

petual domestic peace, through rebellion, revolt, and civil war; 
and to the subversion ol the very order of society of a vast ter- 
ritory and a vast population, finds no parallel in history ; and 
was a puzzle to all the astrologers and soothsayers. It has been 
said of George III. — whose narrow intellect and obstinate tem- 
per so greatly helped on the rebellion of our ancestors to our 
independence — it has been said of George III., that " it was his 
misfortune that, intended by nature to be a farmer, accident 
placed him on a throne." It was the happy fortune of the 
American people, that to the manifest advantages of freedom 
from jealousies of any rivals ; and from commitment, by any 
record, to schemes or theories or sects or cabals, pursued by no 
hatreds, beguiled by no attachments, Mr. Lincoln added a vigor- 
ous, penetrating, and capacious intellect, and a noble, generous 
nature which filled his conduct of the Government, in small 
things and great, from beginning to end, " with malice to none 
and charity to all." These qualities were indispensable to the 
safety of the Government and to the prosperous issue of our 
civil war. In the great crisis of a nation struggling with rebel- 
lion, the presence or absence of these personal traits in a ruler 
may make the turning-point in the balance of its fate. Had 
Lincoln, in dealing with the administration of government dur- 
ing the late rebellion, insisted as George III. did, in his treat- 
ment of the American Revolution, upon " the right of employing 
as responsible advisers those only whom he personally liked, and 
who were ready to consult and execute his personal wishes," 
had he excluded from his counsels great statesmen like Seward 
and Chase, as King George did Fox and Burke, who can meas- 
ure the dishonor, disorder, and disaster into which our affairs 
might have fallen ? Such narrow intelligence and perversity are 
as little consistent with the true working of administration un- 
der our Constitution as they were under the British Constitution, 
and as little consonant with the sound sense as they are with 
the generous spirit of our people. 

By the arrangement of his Cabinet, and his principal appoint- 
ments for critical services, Mr. Lincoln showed at once that na- 
ture had fitted him for a ruler, and accident only had hid his ear- 
lier life in obscurity. I cannot hesitate to think that the pres- 
ence of Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase in the great offices of State 



16 

and Treasury, and their faithful concurrence in the public service 
and the public repute of the President's conduct of the Govern- 
ment, gave to the people all the benefits which might have justly 
been expected from the election of either to be himself the head 
of the Government and much else besides. I know of no war- 
rant in the qualities of human nature, to have hoped that either 
of these great political leaders would have made as good a 
minister under the administration of the other, as President, as 
both of them did under the administration of Mr. Lincoln. I 
see nothing in Mr. Lincoln's great qualities and great authority 
with this people, which could have commensurately served our 
need in any place, in the conduct of affairs, except at their head. 

The general importance, under a form of government where 
the confidence of the people is the breath of the life of execu- 
tive authority, of filling the great offices of state with men who, 
besides possessing the requisite special faculties for their several 
departments and large general powers of mind for politics and 
policies, have also great repute with the party, and great credit 
with the country, was well understood by the President. He 
knew that the times needed, in the high places of government, 
men " who," in Bolingbroke's phrase, " had built about them 
the opinion of mankind which, fame after death, is superior 
strength and power in life." 

Of the great abilities which Mr. Chase, in his administration 
of the Treasury, exhibited through the three arduous years of 
that public service, no question has ever been made. The ex- 
actions of the place knew no limits. A people, wholly unaccus- 
tomed to the pressure of taxation, and with an absolute horror 
of a national debt, was to be rapidly subjected to the first with- 
out stint, and to be buried under a mountain of the last. Taxes 
which should support military operations on the largest scale, 
and yet not break the back of industry which alone could pay 
them ; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise, and 
to the farthest verge of the public credit ; and, finally, the ex- 
treme resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, 
of the subversion of the legal tender, by the substitution of what 
has been aptly and accurately called the " coined credit " of the 
Government for its coined money — all these exigencies and all 
these expedients made up the daily problems of the Secretary's 



17 

life. We may have some conception of the magnitude of these 
financial operations, by considering one of the subordinate con- 
trivances required to give to the currency of the country the 
enormous volume and the ready circulation without which the 
tides of revenue and expenditure coidd not have maintained 
their flow. I refer to the transfer of the paper money of the 
country from the State to the national banks. This transac- 
tion, financially and politically, transcends in magnitude and 
difficulty, of itself alone, any single measure of administrative 
government found in our history, yet the conception, the plan, 
and the execution, under the conduct of Mr. Chase, took less 
time and raised less disturbance than it is the custom of our 
politics to accord to a change in our tariff or a modification of a 
commercial treaty. Another special instance of difficult and 
complicated administration was that of the renewal of the inter- 
course of trade, to follow closely the success of our arms, and 
subdue the interests of the recovered region to the requirements 
of the Government. But I cannot insist on details, where all 
was vast and surprising and prosperous. I hazard nothing in 
saying that the management of the finances of the civil war was 
the marvel of Europe and the admiration of our own people. 
For a great part of the wisdom, the courage, and the overwhelm- 
ing force of will which carried us through the stress of this 
stormy sea, the country stands under deep obligations to Mr. 
Chase as its pilot through its fiscal perils and perplexities. 
Whether the genius of Hamilton, dealing with great difficulties 
and with small resources, transcended that of Chase, meeting 
the largest exigencies with great resources, is an unprofitable 
speculation. They stand together, in the judgment of their 
countrymen, the great financiers of our history. 

A somewhat persistent discrepancy of feeling and opinion 
between the President and the Secretary, in regard to an im- 
portant office in the public service, induced Mr. Chase to resign 
his portfolio, and Mr. Lincoln to acquiesce in his desire. No 
doubt, it is not wholly fortunate in our Government that the 
distribution of patronage, a mixed question of party organiza- 
tion and public service, should so often harass and embarrass 
administration, even in difficult and dangerous times. Mr. 
Lincoln's ludicrous simile is an incomparable description of the 



18 

system as lie found it. He said, at the outset of his administra- 
tion, that " he was like a man letting rooms at one end of his 
house, while the other end was on fire." Some criticism*of the 
Secretary's resignation and of the occasion of it, at the time, 
sought to impute to them consequences of personal acerbity be- 
tween these eminent men, and the mischiefs of competing am- 
bitions and discordant counsels for the public interests. But 
the appointment of Mr. Chase to the chief-justiceship of the 
United States silenced all this evil speech and evil surmise. 

There is no doubt that Mr. Chase greatly desired this office, 
its dignity and durability both considered, the greatest gratifica- 
tion, to personal desires, and the worthiest in public service, and 
in public esteem, that our. political establishment affords. For- 
tunate, indeed, is he who, in the estimate of the profession of 
the law, and in the general judgment of his countrymen, com- 
bines the great natural powers, the disciplined faculties, the 
large learning, the larger wisdom, the firm temper, the amiable 
serenity, the stainless purity, the sagacious statesmanship, the 
penetrating insight, which make up the qualities that should 
preside at this high altar of justice, and dispense to this great 
people the final decrees of a government "not of men, but of 
laws." To whatever President it comes, as a function of his 
supreme authority, to assign this great duty to the worthiest, 
there is given an opportunity of immeasurable honor for his own 
name, and of vast benefits to his countrymen, outlasting his own 
brief authority, and perpetuating its remembrance in the per- 
manent records of justice, "the main interest of all human 
society," so long as it holds sway among men. John Adams, 
from the Declaration of Independence down, and with the 
singular felicity of his line of personal descendants, has many 
titles to renown, but by no act of his life has he done more to 
maintain the constituted liberties which he joined in declaring, 
or to confirm his own fame, than by giving to the United States 
the great Chief -Justice Marshall, to be to us, forever, through 
every storm that shall beset our ship of state — 

" Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw, 
And saving them that eye it." 

In this disposition, Mr. Lincoln appointed Mr. Chase to the 



19 

vacant seat, and the general voice recognized the great fitness 
of the selection. 

I may be permitted to borrow from the well-considered and 
sober words of an eminent judge, the senior Associate on the 
bench of the Supreme Court — words that will carry weight 
with the country which mine could not— a judicial estimate of 
this selection. Mr. Justice Clifford says: "Appointed, as it 
were, by common consent, he seated himself easily and naturally 
in the chair of justice, and gracefully answered every demand 
upon the station, whether it had respect to the dignity of the 
office, or to the elevation of the individual character of the in- 
cumbent, or to his firmness, purity, or vigor of mind. From 
the first moment he drew the judicial robes around him he 
viewed all questions submitted to him as a judge in the calm 
atmosphere of the bench, and with the deliberate consideration 
of one who feels that he is determining issues for the remote 
and unknown future of a great people." 

2£agistratus ostendit virum — the magistracy shows out the 
man. A great office, by its great requirements and great oppor- 
tunities, calls out and displays the great powers and rare quali- 
ties which, presumably, have raised the man to the place. Let 
us consider this last public service and last great station, as they 
exhibit Mr. Chase to a candid estimate. 

And, first, I notice the conspicuous fitness for judicial service 
of the mental and moral constitution of the man. All through 
the heady contests of the vehement politics of his times, his 
share in them had embodied decision, moderation, serenity, and 
inflexible submission to reason as the master and ruler of all 
controversies. Force, fraud, cunning, and all lubric arts and 
artifices, even the beguilements of rhetoric, found no favor with 
him, as modes of warfare or means of victory. So far, then, 
from needing to lay down any weapons, or disuse any methods 
in which he was practised, or learn or assume new habits of 
mind or strange modes of reasoning, Mr. Chase, in the working 
of his intellect and the frame of his spirit, was always judicial. 

It was not less fortunate for the prompt authority of his 
new station, so dependent upon the opinion of the country, that 
his credit for great abilities and capacity for large responsi- 
bilities was already established. Great repute, as well as essen- 



20 

tial character, is justly demanded for all elevated public stations, 
and especially for judicial office, whose prosperous service, in 
capital junctures, turns mainly on moral power with the com- 
munity at large. 

Both these preparations easily furnished the Chief-Justice 
with the requisite aptitude for the three relations, of prime im- 
portance, upon which his adequacy must finally be tested ; I 
mean, his relation to the court as its presiding head, his relation 
to the profession as masters of the reason and debate over which 
the court is the arbiter, and his relation to the people and the 
State in the exercise of the critical constitutional duties of the 
court, as a coordinate department of the Government. 

In a numerous court, that the Chief-Justice should have a 
prevalent and gracious authority, as first among equals, to adjust, 
arrange, and facilitate the cooperative working of its members, 
will not be doubted. For more than sixty years, at least, this 
court had felt this authority — -jiotens et lewis dominatio — in the 
presence of the two celebrated Chief -Justices who filled out this 
long service. Their great experience and great age had sup- 
ported, and general conformity of political feeling, if not opin- 
ion, on the bench, had assisted, this relation of the Chief -Justice 
to the court. 

"When Mr. Chase was called to this station, he found the 
bench filled with men of mark and credit, and his accession made 
an exactly equal division of the court between the creations of 
the old and of the new politics. In these circumstances the prop- 
er maintenance of the traditional relation of the Chief-Justice 
to the court was of much importance to its unbroken authority 
with the public. That it was so maintained was apparent to ob- 
servation, and Mr. Justice Clifford, speaking for the court, has 
shown it in a most amiable light : 

" Throughout his judicial cajecr he always maintained that 
dignity of carriage and that calm, noble, and unostentatious pres- 
ence that uniformly characterized his manners and deportment 
in .the social circle; and, in his intercourse with his brethren, his 
suggestions were always couched in friendly temis, and were 
never marred by severity or harshness." 

As for the judgment of the bar of the country, while it gave 
its full assent to the appointment of Mr. Chase, as an elevated 



21 

and wise selection by the President, upon the general and public 
grounds which should always control, there was some hesitancy, 
on the part of the lawyers, as to the completeness of Mr. Chase's 
professional training, and the special aptitude of his intellect to 
thread the tangled mazes of affairs which form the body of pri- 
vate litigations. The doubt was neither unkind nor unnatural, 
and it was readily and gladly resolved under the patient and 
laborious application, and the accurate and discriminating in- 
vestigation, with which the Chief -Justice handled the diversified 
subjects, and the manifold complexities, which were brought into 
judgment before him. In fact, the original dubitation had over- 
looked the earlier distinction of Mr. Chase at the bar in some 
most important forensic efforts, and had erred in comparing, for 
their estimate, Mr. Chase entering upon judicial employments, 
with his celebrated predecessors, as they showed themselves at 
the close, not at the outset, of their long judicial service. I feel 
no fear of dissent from the profession in saying that those who 
practised in the Circuit or in the Supreme Court while he pre- 
sided, as well as the larger and widely-diffused body of lawyers 
who give competent and responsible study to the reports, recog- 
nize the force of his reason, the clearness of his perceptions, the 
candor of his opinions, and the lucid rhetoric of his judgments, 
as assuring his rank with the eminent judges of our own and the 
mother-cou ntry . 

But, in the most imposing part of the jurisdiction and juris- 
prudence of the court ; in its dominion over all that belongs to 
the law of nations, whether occupied with the weighty questions 
of peace and war, and the multitudinous disturbances of public 
and private law which follow the change from one to the other ; 
or with the complications of foreign intercourse and commerce 
with all the world, which the genius of our people is constantly 
expanding ; in its control, also, of the lesser public law of our 
political system, by which we are a nation of republics, where • 
the bounds of State and Federal authority need constant explo- 
ration, and require accurate and circumspect adjustment ; in its 
final arbitrament on all conflicts and encroachments by which the 
great coordinate departments of the Government are to be con- 
fined to their appropriate spheres ; in that delicate and superb 
supremacy of judicial reason whereby the Constitution confides 



22 

to the deliberations of this court the determination, even, of the 
legality of legislation, and trusts it, nevertheless, to abstain it- 
self from law-making — in all these transcendent functions of the 
tribunal the preparation and the adequacy of the Chief-Justice 
were unquestioned. 

Accordingly, we find in the few years of his service, before 
his decline in health, in the crowd of causes bred by the civil 
war, which pressed the court with novel embarrassments, and 
loaded it with unprecedented labors, that the Chief -Justice gave 
conspicuous evidence, in repeated instances, of that union of the 
faculties of a lawyer and a statesman, which alone can satisfy 
the exactions of this highest jurisdiction, unequaled and unex- 
ampled in any judicature in the world. To name these conspic- 
uous causes merely, without unfolding them, would carry no 
impression ; and time fails for any demonstrative criticism upon 
them. 

There are two passages in the judicial sendee of Mr. Chase 
which, attracting great attention and exciting some difference of 
opinion at the time of the transactions, invite a brief considera- 
tion at your hands. 

The first political impeachment in our constitutional history, 
involving, as it did, the accusation of the President of the 
United States, required the Chief-Justice to preside at the trial 
before the Senate, creating thus the tribunal to which the Con- 
stitution had assigned this high jurisdiction. Beyond the in- 
junction that the Senate, when sitting for the trial of impeach- 
ments, should be " on oath," the Constitution gave no instruction 
to fix or ascertain the character of the procedure, the nature of 
the duty assigned to the specially-organized court, or the distri- 
bution of authority between the Chief-Justice and the Senate. 
The situation lacked no feature of gravity — no circumstance of 
solicitude — and the attention of the whole country, and of 
foreign nations, watched the transaction at every stage of its 
progress. No circumstances could present a greater disparity of 
political or popular forces between accuser and accused, and none 
could be imagined of more thorough commitment of the body of 
the court — the Senate — both in the interests of its members, in 
their political feeling, and their pre-judgments ; all tending to 
make the condemnation of the President, upon all superficial 



23 

calculations, inevitable. The effort of the Constitution to guard 
against mere partisan judgment, by requiring a two-third vote 
to convict, was paralyzed by the complexion of the Senate, show- 
ing more than four-fifths of that body of the party which had 
instituted the impeachment and was demanding conviction. To 
this party, as well, the Chief-Justice belonged, as a founder, a 
leader, a recipient of its honors, and a lover of its prosperity and 
its fame. The President, raised to the office from that of Yice- 
President — to which alone he had been elected — by the deplored 
event of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, was absolutely without a 
party, in the Senate or in the country ; for the party whose suf- 
frages he had received for the vice-presidency was the hostile 
force in his impeachment. And, to bring the matter to the 
worst, the succession to all the executive power and patronage 
of the Government, in case of conviction, was to fall into the ad- 
ministration of the President of the Senate — the creature, thus, 
of the very court invested with the duty of trial and the power 
of conviction. 

Against all these immense influences, confirmed and inflamed 
by a storm of party violence, beating against the Senate-house 
without abatement through the trial, the President was ac- 
quitted. To what wise or fortunate protection of the stability 
of government does the people of this country owe its escape 
from this great peril ? Solely, I cannot hesitate to think, to the 
potency — with a justice-loving, law-respecting people — of the 
few decisive words of the Constitution which, to the common 
apprehension, had impressed upon the transaction the solemn 
character of trial and conviction, under the sanction of the oath 
to bind the conscience, and not of the mere exercise of power, of 
which its will should be its reason. In short, the Constitution 
had made the procedure judicial, and not political. It was this 
sacred interposition that stayed this plague of political resent- 
ments which, with their less sober and intelligent populations, 
have thwarted so many struggles for free government and equal 
institutions. 

Over this scene, through all its long agitations, the Chief- 
Justice presided, with firmness and prudence, with circumspect 
comprehension, and sagacious forecast of the vast consequences 
which hung, not upon the result of the trial as affecting any per- 



24 

sonal fortunes of the President, but upon the maintenance of 
its character as a trial — upon the prevalence of law, and the su- 
premacy of justice, in its methods of procedure, in the grounds 
and reasons of its conclusion. That his authority was greatly 
influential in fixing the true constitutional relations of the Chief- 
Justice to the Senate, and establishing a precedent of procedure 
not easily to be subverted ; that it was felt, throughout the trial, 
with persuasive force, in the maintenance of the judicial nature 
of the transaction ; and that it never went a step beyond the 
office which belonged to him — of presiding over the Senate try- 
ing an impeachment — is not to be doubted. 

The President was acquitted. The disappointment of the 
political calculations which had been made upon, what was felt 
by the partisans of impeachment to be, an assured result, was 
unbounded ; and resentments, rash and unreasoning, were vis- 
ited upon the Chief-Justice, who had influenced the Senate to 
be judicial, and had not himself been political. No doubt, this 
impeachment trial permanently affected the disposition of the 
leading managers of the Republican party toward the Chief- 
Justice, and his attitude thereafter toward that party, in his char- 
acter of a citizen. But the people of the country never assumed 
any share of the resentment of party feeling. The charge against 
him, if it had any shape or substance, came only to this : that 
the Chief-Justice brought into the Senate, under his judicial 
robes, no concealed weapons of party warfare, and that he had 
not plucked from the Bible, on which he took and administered 
the judicial oath, the commandment for its observance. 

Not long after Mr. Chase's accession to the bench there 
came before the court a question, in substance and in form, as 
grave and difficult as any that its transcendent jurisdiction over 
the validity of the legislation of Congress, has ever presented, 
or, •in any forecast we can make of the future, will ever present 
for its judgment ; I mean the constitutionality of that feature 
and quality of the issues of United States notes during the war, 
which made them a legal tender for the satisfaction of private 
debts. This measure was one of the great administrative ex- 
pedients for marshaling the wealth of the country, as rapidly, 
as equally, and as healthfully, to the energies of production and 
industry, as might be, and so as seasonably to meet the immeas- 



25 

urable demands of the public service, in the stress of the war. 
That it was debated and adopted, with full cognizance of its 
critical character, and with extreme solicitude that all its bear- 
ings should be thoroughly explored, and upon the same per- 
emptory considerations, upon which the master of a ship cuts 
away a mast or jettisons cargo, or the surgeon amputates a limb, 
was a matter of history. Mr. Chase, as Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, with a reluctance and repugnance which enhanced the 
weight of his counsels, approved the measure, as one of neces- 
sity for the fiscal operations of the Government, which knew no 
other seasonable or adequate recourse. Upon this imposing and 
authoritative advice of the financial minister, the legal-tender 
trait of the paper issues of the Government was adopted by 
Congress, and without his sanction, presumptively, it would have 
been denied. 

And now, when, after repeated argument at the bar, and 
long deliberations of the court, the decision was announced, the 
determining opinion of the Chief -Justice, in an equal division 
of the six associate justices, pronounced the legal-tender acts un- 
constitutional, as not within the discretion of the political de- 
partments of the Government, Congress, and the Executive, to 
determine this very question of the necessity of the juncture, as 
justifying their enactment. 

The singularity of the situation struck everybody, and greatly 
divided public sentiment between applause and reproaches of • 
the Chief-Justice, as the principal figure both in the adminis- 
trative measure and in its judicial condemnation. But soon, a 
new phase of the unsettled agitation on the merits of the consti- 
tutional question, drew public attention, and created even greater 
excitement of feeling and diversity of sentiment. The court, 
which had been reduced by Congress under particular and tem- 
porary motives, hostile to the appointing power of President 
Johnson, had been again opened by Congress to its permanent 
number, and its vacancies had been filled. A new case, involv- 
ing the vexed question, was heard by the court, and the validity 
of the disputed laws was sustained by its judgment. The signal 
spectacle of the court, which had judged over Congress and the 
Secretary, now judging over itself, gave rise to much satire on 
one side and the other, and to some coarseness of contumely as 



26 

to the motives and the means of these eventful mutations in 
matters, where stability and uniformity are, confessedly, of the 
highest value to the public interests, and to the dignity of gov- 
ernment. 

Confessing to a firm approval of the final disposition of the 
constitutional question by the court, I concede it to be a sub- 
ject of thorough regret that the just result was not reached by 
less uncertain steps. But, with this my adverse attitude to the 
Chief-Justice's judicial position on the question, I find no diffi- 
culty in 'discarding all suggestions which would mix up political 
calculations with his judicial action. The error of the Chief -Jus- 
tice, if, under the last judgment of the court, we may venture so 
to consider it, was in following his strong sense of the supreme 
importance of restoring the integrity of the currency, and his 
impatience and despair at the feebleness of the political depart- 
ments of the Government in that direction, to the point of con- 
cluding that the final wisdom of this great question — inter 
apices juris, as well as of the highest reasons of state — was to 
deny to the brief exigency of war, what was so dangerous to the 
permanent necessities of peace. But a larger reason and a wider 
prudence, as it would seem, favor the prevailing judgment, 
which refused to cripple the permanent faculties of government 
for the unforeseen duties of the future, and drew back the court 
from the perilous edge of law-making, which, overpassed, must 
react to cripple, in turn, the essential judicial power. The past, 
thus, was not discredited, nor the future disabled. 

I have now carried your attention to the round of public 
service which filled the life of Mr. Chase with activity and use- 
fulness, and yet the survey and the lesson are incomplete with- 
out some reference to a station he never attained, to an office 
he never administered ; I mean, to be sure, the presidency. It 
is of the nature of this great place of power and trust, and the 
necessity of the method by which alone it can be reached, to 
present to the ambition and public spirit of political leaders, 
and to the honest hopes and enthusiasm of the great body of 
the people, an equally frequent disappointment. This is not 
the place to insist upon the reasons of this unquestionable mis- 
chief, nor to attempt to point out the escape from them, if in- 
deed the problem be not, in itself, too hard for solution. To 



27 

Mr. Chase, as to all the great leaders of opinion in the present 
and perhaps the last generation of our public men, this disap- 
pointment came, and in his case, as in theirs, brought with it 
the defeat of the hopes and desires of a large following of his 
countrymen, who sought, through his accession to the presidency, 
the elevation of the Government, and the welfare of the people. 

That the range and dignity of Mr. Chase's public employ- 
ments and the large capacity, absolute probity, and unbounded 
energy which he had shown in them, justified his aspiration to 
the presidency, and the public calculations of great benefit from 
his accession to it, may not be doubted. In this state of things 
it is obvious, that he would necessarily be greatly in the minds 
of men, as a candidate for the candidacy, and this, too, whether 
they favored or opposed it, without any implication of undue 
activity of desire, much less of effort, on his part, to obtain the 
nomination. But, it was not in the fortunes of Mr. Chase's 
life to take the flood of any tide, in the restless sea of our poli- 
tics, which led on to the presidency. In 1860 there was no 
principle and no policy of the Republican party which could 
tolerate the postponement of Mr. Seward to Mr. Chase, if a 
political leader was to be put in nomination. In 1864 the para- 
mount considerations of absolute supremacy, which dictated the 
reelection of Mr. Lincoln, would endure no competition of can- 
didates in the Republican party. In 1868, when each party 
seemed, in an unusual degree, free to seek and find its candi- 
dates where it would, Mr. Chase was Chief -Justice, and no issue 
of the public safety existed, which alone, in the settled convic- 
tions of this people, would favor a political canvass by the head 
of the judiciary. 

In a just view of the office of President, as framed in the 
Constitution, which he only, in the whole establishment of the 
Government, is sworn " to preserve, protect, and defend," and 
of the rightful demands of this people from its supreme ma- 
gistracy, I am sure most people will agree that Mr. Chase. pos- 
sessed great qualities for the discharge of its high duties, and 
for the maintenance of good government in difficult times. 
These qualifications I have already unfolded from his life. 
If, indeed, the great hold over the Government, which the 
Constitution secures to the people by the election of the Presi- 



28 

dent, and his direct and constant responsibility to popular opin- 
ion, and the full powers, thus safely confided to him, in the 
name and as the trust of the people at large — if this hold is to 
be exercised and preserved in its appropriate vigor, it can only 
be by the election to the presidency of true leaders of the politi- 
cal opinion of the country. In this way a^one can power and 
responsibility be kept in union ; and any nation which, in the 
working of its government, sees them divorced — sees power 
without responsibility, and responsibility without power — must 
expect dishonor and disaster in its affairs. 

I have, thus, with such success as may be, undertaken to 
separate the thread of this individual character and action from 
that woven tapestry of human life, whose conciliated colors and 
collective force make up one of the noblest chapters of history. 
I have attempted to present in prominent points, passing per 
fastigia rerum, the worth, the work, the duty, and the honor 
which fill out " the sustained dignity of this stately life." From 
his boyhood on the banks of this fair river — famous as having 
given birth and nurture to three Chief-Justices of the United 
States, Ellsworth, Chase, and Waite ; through his first lessons 
in the humanities in beautiful "Windsor, his fuller instruction 
in the lap of this gracious mother, his loved and venerated 
Dartmouth ; through his lessons in law and in eloquence at the 
feet of his great master, Wirt, his study of statesmen and gov- 
ernment at the capital ; through his faithful service to the law, 
that jealous mistress, and his generous advocacy of the rights, 
and resentment of the wrongs, of the unfriended and the un- 
defended ; through his season of stormy politics with its " estua- 
tions of joys and fears;" through the crush and crowd of labors 
and solicitudes which beset him as minister of finance in the 
tensions and perils of war ; through all this steep ascent to the 
serene height of supreme jurisprudence, this life, but a span in 
years, was enough for the permanent service of his country, and 
for the assurance of his fame. " Etenim, Quirltes, exiguum no- 
bis vitfB cnri'iculum natura circumsc7 r ipsit, immensum glorias" 

If I should attempt to compare Mr. Chase, either in resem- 
blance or contrast, with the great names in our public life, of 
our own times, and in our previous history, I should be inclined 
to class him, in the solidity of his faculties, the firmness of his 



29 

will, and in the moderation of his temper, and in the quality of 
his public services, with that remarkable school of statesmen, 
who, through the Revolutionary War, wrought out the indepen- 
dence of their country, which they had declared, and framed the 
Constitution, by which the new liberties were consolidated and 
their perpetuity insured. Should I point more distinctly at 
individual characters, whose traits he most recalls, Ellsworth as 
a lawyer and judge, and Madison as a statesman, would seem 
not only the most like, but very like, Mr. Chase. In the groups 
of his cotemporaries in public affairs, Mr. Chase is always named 
with the most eminent. In every triumvirate of conspicuous 
activity he would be naturally associated. Thus, in the prelimi- 
nary agitations which prepared the triumphant politics, it is 
Chase and Sumner and Hale ; in the competition for the presi- 
dency when the party expected to cany it, it is Seward and 
Lincoln and Chase ; in administration, it is Stanton and Seward 
and Chase ; in the Senate, it is Chase and Seward and Sumner. 
All these are newly dead, and we accord them a common hom- 
age of admiration and of gratitude, not yet to be adjusted or 
weighed out to each. 

Just a quarter of a century before Mr. Chase left these halls 
of learning, the college sent out another scholar of her disci- 
pline, with the same general traits of birth, and condition, and 
attendant influences, which we have noted as the basis of the 
power and influence of this later son of Dartmouth. He played 
a famous part in his time as lawyer, senator, and minister of 
state, in all the greatest affairs, and in all the highest spheres of 
public action; and to his eloquence his countrymen paid the 
singular homage, with which the Greeks crowned that of Peri- 
cles, who alone was called Olympian for his grandeur and his 
power. He died with the turning tide from the old statesman- 
ship to the new, then opening, now closed, in which Mr. Chase 
and his cotemporaries have done their work and made their 
fame. Twenty-one years ago this venerable college, careful of 
the memory of one who had so greatly served as well as honored 
her, heard from the lips of Choate the praise of Webster. 
What lover of the college, what admirer of genius and eloquence, 
can forget the pathetic and splendid tribute which the con- 
summate orator paid to the mighty fame of the great statesman ? 



30 

What mattered it to him, or to the college, that, for the moment, 
this fame was checked and clouded, in the divided judgments 
of his countrymen, by the rising storms of the approaching 
struggle ? But, instructed by the experience of the vanquished 
rebellion, none are now so dull as not to see that the consoli- 
dation of the Union, the demonstration of the true doctrine of 
the Constitution, the solicitous observance of eveiy obligation 
of the compact, were the great preparations for the final issue 
of American politics between freedom and slavery. 

To these preparations the life-work of Webster and his as- 
sociates was devoted; their completeness and adequacy have 
been demonstrated ; the force and magnitude of the explosion 
have justified all their solicitudes lest it should burst the cohe- 
sions of our unity. The general sense of our countrymen now 
understands that the statesmen who did the most to secure the 
common government for slavery and freedom under the frame 
of the Constitution, and who in the next generations did the 
most to strengthen the bonds of the Union, and to avert the last 
test till that strength was assured ; and, in our own latest times, 
did the most to make the contest at last become seasonable 
and safe, thorough and unyielding and unconditional, have all 
wrought out the great problem of our statesmanship, which was 
to assure to us " Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and 
inseparable." They all deserve, as they shall all receive, each 
for his share, the gratitude of their countrymen, and the applause 
of the world. 

To the advancing generations of youth that Dartmouth shall 
continue to train for the service of the republic, and the good 
of mankind, the lesson of the life we commemorate, to-day, is 
neither obscure nor uncertain. The toils and honors of the past 
generations have not exhausted the occasions nor the duties of 
our public life, and the preparation for them, whatever else it 
may include, can never omit the essential qualities which have 
always marked every prosperous and elevated career. These 
are energy, labor, truth, courage, and faith. These make up 
that ultimate wisdom to which the moral constitution of the 
world assures a triumph. — " Wisdom is the principal thing ; she 
shall bring thee to honor ; she shall give to thy head an orna- 
ment of grace ; a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee." 



E 415 
.9 

.C4 E92 
Copy 1 



THE ONLY BIOGRAPHY AUTHORIZED BY MR. CHASE'S FAMILY. 



The Life artcL JPixbVic Services of 



SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, 

LATE CHIEF-JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES; 
Formerly United States Senator, Governor of Ohio, and Secretary of the Treasury. 



BY 

J. W. SCHTJCKERS, 

FOR MANT TEAKS PRIVATE SECRETART TO MR. CHASE. 

WITH THE EULOGY ON MR. CHASE, DELIVERED AT DARTMOITH, 
JOE 24, BY HON. WM. 81. EYARTS. 



New York, July 10, 1874. 
Messrs. D. APPLETON & CO., 

Gentlemen: We are gratified to learn that tlie " Life and Public Services of Salmon 
P. Chase, Late Chief-Justice of the United States," by Mr. J. W. Schuckers, and lately an- 
nounced by you, is on the eve of publication. We hope it may find a large sale. 

Mr. Schuekers's long and close association with Mr. Chase, in a confidential capacity, 
having been for many years and at his death his private secretary, peculiarly fits him, in our 
judgment, for writing a history of Mr. Chase's Life. 

We know that this book is approved by all the members of Mr. Chase's family, and 
those of his friends who have examined advance sheets. 



Very truly yours, 



Hiram Barnf.t, 

Late Collector of Port of N. Y. 
John J. Cisco. 

Late Assistant Treasurer U. S. 
Edwards Piehuepont, 

Connselor-at-Law. 



Chas. G. Franckxtn, 

Agent ol Cunard Line. 
William Orton, 

Pres't Western Union Tel. 
Whitelaw Reid, 

Editor New York Tribune. 



SOLD BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY. 



Price, in elegant Cloth Binding, $5 CO; Leather, $6.00 ; Half Turkey Morocco, $7 50, 
D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

H4i) & 531 BROADWAY, A'. Y. 



